Thanks for the pointers. So is this trap fairly easy to clean after it caught something? I just don't want to touch the dead rat. Also how big is it? I think I have a fairly big rat and not a mouse (based on the size of the droppings). Will this trap be big enough to catch a rat? I will go to OSH and pick one up tonight and try it.

 

use a pellet gun?

 

I would, except mine is broken. You got one to loan? But those critters really move too fast for me to keep a steady aim.

I'm off to OSH to buy their traps.

 

Get the Rat traps at any Walgreens. Place peanut butter in a small piece of stocking (womans) and tie it to the peddle with fishing line. The nylon from the stocking will get caught in the rats teeth and trip the trap.

Second, place the traps against the wall (i'd use at least three, in different areas) If you catch one, there are probably two or three more. Check the trap the next morning since rodents are nocturnal. Dump the rat or dump the trap whichever.

Last and most important! Find the area they're coming from and fix it soon as they will return through the same hole. If you've had this problem before, the rats will leave an oily mark where they enter and exit.

I was in pest control for 6 years so I'm not steering you wrong. Forget the glue traps!

 

+1 for sticky traps... thats what we used in the philippines... where there were HELLA rats... if the glue traps sound inhumane, then just think about it, if you had a cage trap, you would actually have to worry about killing the rat yourself when you catch it... as opposed to it just getting stuck on a sticky trap and you know... you just throw it away in a dumpster...
no like old school rat traps... those get messy... and i hate cleaning crap.
gud luck with your pest problem, make sure they dont chew through your soft top...

 

I bought the "jaws o' death" traps from OSH as suggested by Wu. I baited them with peanut butter and set them out in the garage last night (near the walls where I found droppings). Nothing was caught by this morning. I'll keep checking for the next few days while I keep my S2K out of the garage.

 

Perpendicular to the wall? Bait peddle towards wall? Rodents have bad eye sight and use their whiskers as a way of feeling their way around.

 

This is hilarious....

I caught a few in the past, stuck them into a big sock and smack. im going to hell

 

Some bad-news/good-news update.

Bad news is that so far, the jaws-o-death traps have not caught anything.

Good news is the Vector Control person came out and looked at the droppings and decided they were squirrel droppings and not rat droppings. So we really have a squirrel problem in the garage and not a rat problem. But we have so many squirrels in our neighborhood that it is impossible to kill them all. So now I'm parking my car back in the garage. But I was advised to seal up the (small) gap at the bottom of my garage door to keep the squirrels from coming in -- funny we lived in the house for 15 years and never had a problem with squirrels in our garage until now.

 

I've been away for awhile. The trap is fairly easy to clean. It has a removable, tiny tray for the bait.

The trap is roughly the size of a fist. You won't have to touch any rat that you've caught. You just hold the trap over the garbage can, squeeze the handle open, and out drops the rat.

The trap is plenty big to catch a rat. It only needs to clamp down on its head or upper torso.

I read somewhere that rats are drawn to the smell of other rats, so even if the trap has a little bit of rat guts/blood, you don't need to clean it that well. Rinsing it with water is fine. Sure enough, I've caught rats on consecutive days with the same trap.